Just How Real are our Reels?

I was looking at my Instagram feed the other day, thinking about what a suberb job I had done curating my highlight reel to look.. well.. like a highlight reel.

Pretty holidays, cute kids, delicious meals, awesome mates blah blah blah.

It got me thinking about how little of my real life is actually captured on my feed, and how much each of us buys into the confected world of other people’s feeds.

We all do it.

I spend many evenings staring into the lives of both friends and strangers on Instagram and Facebook, and then when I want to feel totally inadequate, I’ll shift to Linked In to cop a big fat dose of “you are SO sh*t Maria. BE BETTER”.

I have to say, I mostly love connecting with friends and family on these social platforms. I adore keeping up to date with baby announcements, career changes and looking at fun family holiday photographs.

But occasionally I’ll heave a massive sigh, throw my phone at the wall (well, um, put it on charge for the night), and head to bed thinking that everyone is doing life so much better than me.

A bit silly? Totally.

But so is our assumption that people’s showreel is their ENTIRE life reel.

I was having a conversation with a friend recently about just how perfectly assembled into bite sized pockets of rainbows and unicorns everyone’s Insta lives appeared.

“It’s just – everyone looks so bloody happy ALL THE TIME”, she cried. “I mean that’s great, I want them to be happy of course .. but I feel like I just can’t relate to their picture perfect lives”.

Of course we can’t relate to their Instagram lives. Because guess what? Noone lives like that ALL THE TIME.

That would be weird.

We work. We fight with our partners. We get annoyed massively with our kids. We hate our neighbours (some of us). We become sick. We get dumped. You get the drift.

One look at my own ‘highlights’ and I know without any doubt in my mind that some of my posts were made at particularly low points in my life. Moments where I have struggled with co-parenting, or worried excessively about my eldest daughter living in Covid-riddled Melbourne, or stressed about the health of my family members, or have just generally not felt joy in that moment.

Off the back of the conversation with my mate, I’m consciously trying and do better at presenting a more authentic insight into my world.

I’ve also undertaken a good cull of the Instagram pages and people I follow.

The truth is, some influencers don’t make me feel great. There is absolutely zero relatable content they are serving me up, and their picturesque lives are so far from anyone’s reality they have practically become caricatures. They may as well be living in Disneyland.

Give me authentic any day of the week.

I want the real in people’s lives. I want to know when people are dealing with ratty kids and sleepless nights. When they’ve struggled with the day to day grind of kids and work. When they’ve had to take care of elderly parents. When they’ve persisted through their own mental health issues. When they are lonely, or sad or defeated. When everything is just a little too much in these unprecedented Covid times.

Because all of this is how we feel connected to each other.

It’s how we find the strength to get through the ‘unseen’ moments that might not make the cut on our socials.

And most importantly, it’s how we know that while life can sometimes be a little bit sh*t, we will always have a community of other women telling us - “I’ve been there .. and I’m absolutely hearing you”.